https://gitlab.com/abologna/kubevirt-and-kvm/-/blob/master/Backpropagation.md # Backpropagation Whenever a partial VM configuration is submitted to libvirt, any missing information is automatically filled in to obtain a configuration that's complete enough to guarantee long-term guest ABI stability. PCI addresses are perhaps the most prominent example of this: most management applications don't include this information at all in the XML they submit to libvirt, and rely on libvirt building a reasonable PCI topology to support the requested devices. For example, using a made-up YAML syntax for brevity, the input could look like ```yaml devices: disks: - image: /path/to/image.qcow2 ``` and the output could be augmented by libvirt to look like ```yaml devices: controllers: - model: pcie-root-port address: type: pci domain: 0x0000 bus: 0x00 slot: 0x01 function: 0x0 disks: - image: /path/to/image.qcow2 model: virtio-blk address: type: pci domain: 0x0000 bus: 0x01 slot: 0x00 function: 0x0 ``` This is where backpropagation comes in: the only version of the VM configuration that is complete enough to guarantee a stable guest ABI is the one that includes all information added by libvirt, so if the management application wants to be able to make further changes to the VM it needs to reflect the additional information back into its understanding of the VM configuration somehow. For applications like virsh and virt-manager, this is easy: they don't have their own configuration format or even store the VM configuration, and simply fetch it from libvirt and operate on it directly every single time. oVirt, to the best of my knowledge, generates an initial VM configuration based on the settings provided by the user, submits it to libvirt and then parses back the augmented version, figuring out what information was added and updating its database to match: if the VM configuration needs to be generated again later, it will include all information present in the database, including those that originated from libvirt rather than the user. KubeVirt does not currently perform any backpropagation. There are two ways a user can influence PCI address allocation: * explicitly add a `pciAddress` attribute for the device, which will cause KubeVirt to pass the corresponding address to libvirt, which in turn will attempt to comply with the user's request; * add the `kubevirt.io/placePCIDevicesOnRootComplex` annotation to the VM configuration, which will cause KubeVirt to provide libvirt with a fully-specified PCI topology where all devices live on the PCIe Root Bus. In all cases but the one where KubeVirt defines the full PCI topology itself, it's implicitly relying on libvirt always building the PCI topology in the exact same way every single time in order to have a stable guest ABI. While this works in practice, it's not something that libvirt actually guarantees: once a VM has been defined, libvirt will never change its PCI topology, but submitting the same partial VM configuration to different libvirt versions can result in different PCI topologies.
